Thomas MacMillan Photo
A week after the feds slammed the town’s police procedures, a damning new report prepared by Yale student attorneys indicates that East Haven police ticket Latino drivers at vastly disproportionate rates — then record them as white motorists, concealing the facts.
The new report, issued Thursday evening by Yale Law School students, states that over an eight-month period, nearly 60 percent of traffic tickets in East Haven involved Latino drivers. Yet police recorded the ethnicity of drivers as “Hispanic” in less than 5 percent of traffic tickets, according to the report. Read it here.
The Yale report follows just one week after the U.S. Department of Justice issued a letter to East Haven’s lawyer, stating that the department had found significant “areas of concern” in its investigation of policies at the East Haven police department. The Department of Justice has been looking into allegations — raised by a Fair Haven church — that East Haven police are engaged in harassment and abuse of Latinos.
East Haven business owners like Marcia Chacon (pictured) claim Latinos are subject to unwarranted traffic stops, harassment, and even violence at the hands of East Haven cops. Police have denied the charges.
The Department of Justice’s letter to East Haven listed seven different areas of concern, from inadequate oversight of officers’ use of force to a lack of a proper citizen complaint process. That letter prompted East Haven Mayor April Capone Almon to place police chief Len Gallo on administrative leave this week. He turned over his badge and gun on Wednesday. Read the letter here.
The police brass shake-up is the latest development in an ongoing story of alleged police harassment of Latinos just over New Haven’s border in East Haven — a border that separates not just towns, but two vastly different approaches to a growing local immigrant community.
The alleged ongoing harassment first came to light last year when a New Haven priest, Father James Manship, was arrested in an East Haven store while videotaping police who were allegedly harassing the storeowners. Click play to see his camera footage.
Manship Friday welcomed the traffic ticket report as quantitative proof that a problem exists, which will make it more difficult to ignore. “Now it’s some hard facts,” he said. “Are you going to keep saying we don’t have a problem here?”
Manship’s Fair Haven church, St. Rose of Lima, filed a complaint with the Department of Justice, which the department decided last December to investigate.
Last fall, as part of its own investigation into the East Haven Police Department, St. Rose of Lima requested to see records of traffic tickets issued by police on Main Street and Route 80 between June 1, 2008 and Feb. 28, 2009. Those tickets were analyzed by Yale student attorneys assisting St. Rose, resulting in Thursday’s report.
The East Haven Police Department did not turn over all the information requested by St. Rose of Lima. That failure is the subject of an ongoing Freedom of Information case.
In the newly released study, Yale students compared the names on the traffic tickets to lists of Hispanic names, including a list developed by the U.S. Census. The students then determined that 56.3 percent of traffic tickets in the eight-month period were issued to Hispanics. This is significant in a town with a Hispanic population of just 5.8 percent, the report states.
Yale students then compared their analysis of the ethnicity of drivers with the ethnicities reported by East Haven police. They found that police “failed to correctly identify the race of vast majority of individuals to whom they issued traffic tickets.” Police reported giving tickets mostly to white people. Police recorded Hispanic drivers for only 4.8 percent of tickets, according to the report.
An accompanying graph shows that one officer in particular, Dennis Spaulding, is responsible for 97 tickets issued to people with Hispanic names. Another graph shows that Spaulding reported issuing 120 tickets to white people, four to black people, and none to Hispanic drivers in the same period. Spaulding has been accused by name of racial harassment by Latino business owners.
Another graph shows that Hispanic drivers on average received higher fines following traffic stops than other ethnicities.
One section of the report states that traffic tickets were issued more proportionally by ethnicity when East Haven police were engaged in “Click It or Ticket,” a national program of seatbelt enforcement checkpoints. East Haven police stopped only five Hispanics and 35 white people at such checkpoints. The report suggests that since Click It or Ticket is a national program, “the pattern of discriminatory enforcement dissipates when the EHPD is operating under state and/or federal guidelines.”
In conclusion, the report states that the disproportionate level of traffic stops involving Hispanics, provides “indirect support” for allegations of racial harassment and abuse. Combined with the improper recording of ethnicities, the findings “may suggest EHPD officers lack the training and supervision they need to fairly enforce the law,” the report states.
Tafari Lumumba, a student attorney working on the case, said the report will be sent to the Department of Justice, “to supplement their investigation.”
The ultimate goal is to “change the culture of the department,” Lumumba said. Chief Gallo’s administrative leave is a “good first step,” but the policing problems in East Haven are department-wide.
“It’s not just one or two bad apples,” Lumumba said.
Meanwhile, police harassment continues in East Haven, Lumumba said. He and the rest of the legal team still receive phone calls every week from people complaining about the use of racial slurs by police, or reports of police “putting their hands on people.”
“Not much has truly changed,” Lumumba said.
“As recently as Sunday night, somebody else was accosted and threatened,” Manship said.
From the beginning, St. Rose of Lima has been trying to document what has been happening in East Haven, Manship said. “But we’ve been told by town officials that it’s not happening.”
On Friday afternoon, Chacon was behind the counter of her Main Street business, My Country Store. She said the policing situation has improved recently. However, “People still tell me they are stopped for no reason,” she said. “Some people are still afraid.”
The ouster of Chief Gallo is a sign of justice, Chacon said. But more needs to be done. New regulations need to be implemented at the police department, she said.
Asked for comment about the traffic tickets report, Mayor Almon’s office emailed a statement released after the mayor ordered Chief Gallo to administrative leave:
“Department of Justice has noted a complete lack of training, guidelines, oversight and supervision in a number of critical areas. The question now is; has there been a complete lack of leadership in these critical areas? At the end of the day my concern is how to prevent this from exposing the town to liability which would ultimately cost taxpayers’ money.”
Previous Independent stories about alleged racial profiling in East Haven:
• FOIC Slaps East Haven
• Feds To Probe Racial Profiling Claims
• Immigrant Advocates, Supremacists Clash
• March Aims At Immigration Clampdown
• Routine Police Work? Or Retaliation?
• Case Dismissed, Priest Goes On Offense
• Priest’s Video Contradicts Police Report
• White Supremacists Pay A Visit
• City Priest Pleads Not Guilty
• Cross-Border Cops Arrest Father Jim